Pictures: Past Olympic Venues—Rotting, Renovated, Repurposed

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Pictures: Past Olympic Venues—Rotting, Renovated, Repurposed

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When the torch is lit Friday and the 2012 Olympics in London get underway, seven years and some $20 billion worth of preparations will end.

But what will happen to the city's Olympic venues once the games are over? A look at former host cities suggests the facilities could face an uncertain future.

London plans for its Olympic venues to be repurposed. The publicly owned, 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium (pictured), for example, has a temporary upper tier that can be dismantled after the Games to create a 25,000-seat venue better suited to everyday events.

And the Olympic Park, situated in a formerly run-down East London industrial zone, is slated to become an urban ecological oasis and a hub for the new East London Tech City development. Athlete villages will be turned into affordable housing, and other sporting facilities will be made available to clubs, universities, and the public. (See pictures of East London in National Geographic magazine.)

But repurposing schemes have been touted at past Olympics, with varying degrees of success.

"If you really want to develop a part of a city like East London, it probably makes sense not to use 250 acres [100 hectares] and hundreds of millions of dollars on an Olympic park and stadium. There are probably better uses for that money," Zimbalist said.

—Brian Handwerk

Photograph from Yomiuri Shimbun/AP

Then: Beijing Water Cube

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps amassed eight gold medals in the Water Cube (pictured).

The aquatic facility cost more than a hundred million U.S. dollars and won a host of architectural and engineering awards. It was also one of the world's largest competitive swimming centers, with seating for 17,000 people.

Once witness to flattops, bunny hops, hucks, and other off-road stunts, Beijing's BMX cycling course—site of the sport's Olympic debut—sits deserted and overgrown four years after the 2008 games.

BMX will return to the Olympics in 2012, but the Beijing track—like the city's baseball arena and rowing and kayaking center—seems unlikely to see sporting action anytime soon.

China went to great lengths to showcase itself with the Games, even seeding clouds to provide sunny skies. But research shows that most Olympics don't provide much of a lasting tourism benefit for their host cities, Zimbalist said.

"The only really positive case that I see is Barcelona," he explained. "It took them a while, but they really did develop the city as a successful tourist destination. It may have happened anyway-we'll never know."

Tens of thousands rally in February 2012 for Russia's then prime minister, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow's Luzhniki Olympic Stadium—an example of a venue that has thrived since its Olympic days.

Previously named for Lenin, the stadium was built in the 1950s as a showplace of Soviet-era athletic prowess.

When the U.S.S.R. hosted the 1980 Olympic Games, the stadium was the centerpiece, though the games were marred by a U.S.-led boycott joined by dozens of countries.

The Luzhniki stadium is still used regularly by Russian professional soccer teams and has hosted major international soccer tournaments. Its likely to get a facelift before its next one, the 2018 World Cup final.

The outbreak of World War II prevented Helsinki, Finland's Tennis Palace, or Tennispalatsi (seen in an undated photo), from seeing Olympic tennis action, but today it enjoys a second life as a cultural center.

Originally built in the 1930s as an automotive dealership, the facility was converted in preparation for the 1940 Summer Olympics, which were eventually cancelled.

Tennispalatsi did have a day in the Olympic sun in 1952, as a basketball venue for that year's Summer Games.

In subsequent decades the building deteriorated and was nearly torn down. Now refurbished, it houses the Helsinki City Art Museum, the Museum of Cultures, and a movie theater.

Home to the University of Southern California's Trojans since 1923, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (pictured during a 2010 football game) has hosted two Super Bowls and a World Series as well as the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics.

The coliseum's long, multipurpose history is an example of how Los Angeles beat the odds to make money on the 1984 games, Zimbalist noted.

"Los Angeles didn't really do much building for the Olympics," he said.

"The [1976] Olympics in Montreal left a terrible debt burden that they didn't pay off until 2006. Nobody wanted to host until the [International Olympic Committee] said it would guarantee losses."